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Familiar with Spiel’s work, I had noticed “last call” in a recent review Presa Press has put out in Michigan. I see that it has been reprinted in his new collection, Barely Breathing. The poem simply documents the tumbling down of reason in a man’s last hours. It reminded me of a summer job I had at the World War 1 Veterans Hospital in Napa Valley, CA.A cranky fellow needed a bedpan when the staff was out to lunch. The whole staff got hell because, as kitchen help, I had brought the bedpan to the old man’s side. Kitchen help were not allowed in the ward itself. The next morning, as I came to work, I heard an attendant refer to this same patient in these terms as the attendant carried another bedpan out of the ward. “There he was, staring at the ceiling, dead as a doornail, both eyes popped wide open, perhaps not scolding anyone but, like, man, asking what’s going on?” Where does the meaning come from? Is there any? What are the boundaries between burgeoning health and the symptoms of being only a human being? When and how does love and affection enter into any of it? Do we dare dismiss the indifference of the ward attendant’s casual remark? Can the ward attendant afford to grieve for a whole barracks full of dying veterans?

We all wonder in a quiet moment of reflection at the phenomenon of existence, of being alive, at being who we are in the middle of it all, feeling and thinking as we do. Mr. Taylor, aka Spiel’s stance is to move us to the outer edge of it all where we are spinning on the rim of the phonograph record, or in the complexity of the compact disc or among the molecules packed in the memory bank of the computer as he drags in the capacity for intelligence, that awareness of knowledge of life that can look in the mirror and see the endless vista before us reflected in back of us as far as the eye can see. The Christian Bible sums it up beyond the grammar of normal English in the assertion, “I am that I am” where the first person pronoun is both the private individual clinging to his identity and the totality of the universe which our senses take in and make real. For me, this is Spiel’s stance from many angles – not an answer, or a solution, or a doctrine. It is an insight that absorbs science, history and experience, along with the compulsion to put it into words, whether we are thoughtful poet or attendants speaking spontaneously in a hospital ward.

Spiel’s work questions the quandary of death itself. He wisely avoids denying it with platitudes on the one hand or explicating it on the other since either approach would only bring us to temporary palliatives, or, in other words, bad poetry. Indeed, it is a mistake to gauge or measure the affect of death. It seems to matter most when one has already given an irretrievable part of yourself to someone else. Your own identity is partly defined in another person’s very existence. At that person’s death one becomes a little insane as one realizes that this possibility is now a fact that is too large for one’s reason to grasp or deny. Spiel’s work translates the facts and the insanity into words. I have a theory that all artistic expression is the process of translation so that the unintelligible, like an unsolvable mystery, can be grasped, even if not completely accepted.

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A review of barely breathingby Donna Mack, first published in Chiron Review

barely breathing

by The Poet Spiel

foreward by David Chorlton

2010, 190 pp, pbk, (perfect bound)

March Street Press, 3413 Wilshire, Greensboro NC

ISBN 1-59661-135-9

9.00

barely breathing by the poet Spiel is a powerful and disturbing collection that takes you places you may not want to go. He makes you see what you may not want to see. With a knack for dead on descriptive focus and startling poetic observations, he creates characters whose quirky experiences and dark struggles thread their way through this collection. There is no sentimental sympathy here nor is there much hope. Casting the Poet as society’s Savior isn’t the message here, or is it? In the outsider’s tongue our hero shoots straight, sounding the alarm of a dying culture.

he ruffles the sober transfigures eyes of the blind leaves the complacent bleeding...abandoning the meekest who shudderbehind the shock of revelation... in this part of town,the poet unreels the injustices silently endured by the migrant workers.He takes the reader on a walk through contemporary hell: As when our hombre, quietly roasting as he works on the hiway, takes lunch. just like the rest of these laborers as they sun-scorch the egg and refried beans they salt from their brows

and at day’s end:

...back to his old lady always napping where he does not know the names of all his kidsand finally:

—not even the rabbit screams when you slash its throat

Out of the smorgasbord of life the poet Spiel unflinchingly creates a voice exposing what is painful and decaying, and as the title barely breathingsuggests, dying. A truth teller and a liar, this voice is both the torturer and the tortured, whose only relief seems to be the occasional hint of gleeful S&M.

In the skinning pit we find and you: knowing he (that sweet shy man at the video store) surely sensed your secret affair with lecter because you were not the only one seeking that exhilaration, because if there was such a thing as a dog-eared copy of a video, certainly silence of the lambs was exactly that, and all those who rented it had that same hunger in their eyes: all of them

white men barely breathing…

Again in the skinning pit, we find our hero this time at Sam’s Club, ready to purchase a video of Silence

…—barely breathing—you wait out front of sam’s club till it opens…

...just as soon as the passions of the well-pursed lambs, cast as white hordes, appear to stampede theaisles, like blind sheep spilling over a cliff—and you will know you cannot save them...

and for the first time, you breathefreely Not all of these poems whisper or shout with anger, pain and terror. on swallowing takes a break from this horror. It is a complex sensitive and insightful poem about the death of father. There is much here. I will touch on just a bit of it as the poet recounts the loss of father’s abilities over a decade until finally in the hospital: his mind on track but could not send its signals from a soup spoon to his mouth humiliation at the spills upon his lap... Though father can no longer swallow or suck even milk (the first food ) through a straw, the poet leaves us thinking what really can’t be swallowed is any more of this life itself.

Even so this is a poem of resolution and redemption.he had given me the gift that surely every son must wish hadtold me that he’d come to see me as a man and that he’dcome to honor me this man who could no longer swallow

Barely breathing represents 10 years of intense, significant work by the poet Spiel. Each many-layered poem is packed with realistic and symbolic meaning pointing to a dying culture.

Donna Mack

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Review by George Kuntzman

barely breathing

By The Poet Spiel

March Street Press, 3413 Wilshire

Greensboro, NC 2010, 190 pp., $9.00

Spiel’s barely breathing prompts a reintroduction to a selection from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In compiling his mini-anthology, Spiel probably wasn’t thinking of Coleridge, and Coleridge, dead and safely ensconced in tradition and all, certainly didn’t know about Spiel. However, with no disrespect to either Spiel or Coleridge, I’ll use Coleridges’s assistance to review Spiel’s book.

Coleridge helps by acknowledging a separation of Spiel’s work into categories. David Chorlton’s foreward mentions prose; Coleridge offers two others—prose and poetry. Addressing the rational, prose is self-explanatory. Poetry and poems complement each other, with the poems the primary focus of this review.

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria appeared in 1817. From this work comes a technique that helps to explain writing, even that as modern as Spiel’s. Coleridge distinguishes between poetry and poems, and he assigns the proper function to each. The function of poetry is to provide a fount, and any poem emerging from this fount 1) immediately pleases and 2) has all parts fitting perfectly. The image that comes to mind is that of jigsaw puzzle. One that lacks pieces is a potential puzzle only; moreover, trying to add pieces to a completed puzzle is futile. A poem is similar. A missing line or word results in a lack of unity while excessive verbiage overburdens the work. This background, then, provides the basis for analysis of three poems: “the wasting,” “second call,” and “dead mothers.”

The poem “the wasting,” built on a contrast between awareness and ignorance, suggests that, although we possess information about “the nature of a rock,” we lack crucial knowledge about humanity, and we deceive ourselves about our human nature. The actor in the poem cannot portray a character; on the contrary, the actor has no idea what he is doing throughout life or who he really is. The character evaluation compiled by the “mourner” comes in overdue and comes up short. In this ten-line poem, every line belongs, and every word belongs in each line. The poem pleases, and the parts all fit.

The poem “second call,” built on an Old Testament allusion, takes living creatures on a hypothetical sea cruise. With satisfying and self-deprecatory mockery, the poet questions his ability to contribute to a voyage intended to refurbish the planet. In a particularly fortuitous choice of words, the poet opts for a “second call”—not “another chance.” The poem pleases, and the parts all fit.

The poem “dead mothers,” built on a repetition, insists on acknowledging that dead mothers influence their offspring. In this poem, the repeated phrase does not reinforce likeness. Mentioned the second time, the words point to a direction different from the first utterance. At the beginning, wearing “your white socks in the dirt” suggests permission, but at the end, thanks to a clever trap (“the/dead mothers of america club”), these “dead mothers,” like the furies of Greek mythology, threaten to put a curse on those who dare to wear their “white socks/in the dirt.” In eighteen short lines, the poem has made an effortless transition from permission to threat. Having read the poem, I vow never to wear my white socks in the dirt, and whatever did become of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and the 1919 Chicago White Sox? The poem pleases, and all the parts fit.

Numerous devices become the parts of poems, and alert readers can recognize these devices. While Coleridge seems to have directed his criticism to poets and critics, his criticism today applies to a modern audience. Any poet should welcome any discerning reader evaluating the poet’s choice: prose, poetry, or poems. Spiel’s barely breathing offers that choice.

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barely breathing reviewed by Mary Jean Porter in The Pueblo Chieftain

His inscription notes "barely breathing" is a scrapbook that will be combed by unknown readers who will choose the final disposition of his identity.

I don't want to try to identify or categorize the poet Spiel, or to follow him too closely into the dark, pain-filled spaces he evokes. I'd rather just read his finely strung words, feel the tension build, wait for the little shiver-up-the-spine, the gasp that comes at the end of a good poem. And by "good" I mean a poem whose emotion grabs me, whose words stack up in a delicate yet tough construction like a skeleton minus its flesh.

"barely breathing" is filled with many feelings, some of them expressed quite graphically. They include:

- Delicious irony in the buffet meal following a 10K cancer-benefit run where the participants dine on free-range chicken and sip peach- and vanilla-scented wine while the cancer patient herself can't keep any food down (“especially for nan”).

- A sentiment sounding like tenderness for the 95-year-old who sends Christmas packages of hand-embroidered dish towels and gooey cinnamon rolls that, after more than two decades, may indeed be celebrating the long union of two sons. "olga's knuckles look like complex knots tied/with half-inch rope by a conflicted boy scout/she's got cataracts pestering her but somehow finds/her way to ben franklin's to choose new decals/for her fancy needlework . . ." (“olga ties”).

- Urgency as joe the poet, his writing hand in need of stitches and wrapped in a brown bag, and joe the indian whose three frail babies' mothers' milk has ceased to flow, and joe the farmer gasping flu-contaminated air — as the three wait for a nurse to decide who needs attention first (“joe the poet”).

- A strange compassion for the woman who's filled her home with precisely placed objects yet who feels clumsy and "sees herself/as a whale/in a thimble's sea/of mire," who longs for someone to admire her things, and when that admiring stranger finally arrives — "the gentle man/with diamonds/where his eyes/should be" — he is there to settle her estate (“iris”).

The collection contains poetry and some prose written during the past 10 years. It's dedicated to some of the independent press editors who've published Spiel's work in online and hard-copy journals. The book can be purchased through his website, www.thepoetspiel.name

Mary Jean Porter

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barely breathing

poems by the poet spiel

by Arnold Skemer

Published in ZYX 10/10

BARELY BREATHING, Spiel, March Street Press, 3413 Wilshire, Greensboro, N.C. 1-59661, 190 pp., perfect bound, $9.00. 2010, This collection includes ten years (2009-2009) of his work as a poet and, if you’re looking for smiley face verse, you certainly won’t find it here. Spiel is nasty, hateful, misanthropic, contemptuous, pessimistic, despairing, fatalistic, misogynistic with a curious seasoning of self-loathing but, in all this, perhaps, he reflects the spirit of the age. And then there is this, well…..ugliness over what he writes. There is this unpleasant taste in your mouth when all is done. It lingers there and you would prefer that it not be there. There is no sense in denying it but please, don’t take this as dismissive. There are certain things that I admire in his attitudes. Some readers crave the total opposite of greeting card verse: “Your mama’s pussy bore it into you,” “The route’s prepared till you get to nowhere and can’t get out.” Another thing that struck the reviewer, “Miracle Tree,”’ p.26, being a rhapsody to the tree he masturbated under when engaged in youthful homosexual fantasy, it now being utterly erased along with his boyhood neighborhood in a townhouse development. The past is wiped away. His childhood home is gone and his jack-off tree with it! Also, there are a number of poems of powerful homoeroticism. Need it be said that they are not of the elegiac, celebratory type like Whitman’s but rather brutal stuff. If you like this sort of material you will surely make an emotional and erotic connection. But let’s face it. Not everybody goes for this type of relentless downbeat poetry. That doesn’t mean that you crave Hallmark Cards. Just be warned that Spiel is like a raging toothache. He’s not for everybody. It’s a matter of taste. Spiel just ain’t pretty verse. And as you walk away from this volume the ugliness sticks with you, like the smell of dog shit on your ripple sole shoes. You can’t seem to get rid of it after you’ve stepped in it. Maybe it’s uncomfortable for many of us to hear the unvarnished truth.